Chris' Occasional Rants ...or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the net
Home Blogging for peace www.cbrody.com Stand Down Peaceblogs Peaceblog.net Join the Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech Campaign		05 April 2003   Extreme rhetoric makes for bad debate Ben Fritz argues that as the invasion continues, and debates rage about tactics and policies, some politicians and pundits have been using extreme rhetoric that serves only to shut down open discussion, rather than encourage it. The New York Post's Ralph Peters, for instance, ...has referred to the New Yorker as "a minor magazine loosely affiliated with the Baghdad regime." This is simply absurd. Does Peters ever read the magazine? It has been broadly supportive of the "War on Terror" and the invasion all along, even if the editorial line sometimes disagrees with the Bush administration's methods. On the other hand, in his online column for The Nation, John Nichols compared the current media to that of the Soviet Union and labeled some right-wing pundits "neo-conservative commisars." Now this I can almost sympathise with, but it doesn't help in trying to understand what's actually going on. It seems the US media are unable to see beyond the binary world view that they have themselves created, with eager prompting by those in power in Washington. The progressive left's reaction, sometimes using outdated and simplistic metaphors, makes it difficult to take the attacks seriously. Now Akamai, a web hosting company, has pulled the plug on Al-Jazeera, giving no reason for their decision. Who, I wonder, put the pressure on them? The government, their advertisers, or was it simply a policy decision coloured by the fact that the company is Jewish-run and possibly against the right of free speech for the Arab community? The corporate media (and the wider business community) seems to be completely in tow to this "us and them" approach, fostered by concepts such as the "Axis of Evil". Is this simple self-interest, or is it a new form of "corporate fascism"? Guilty as charged. Source: spinsanity 4:34:14 AM  comment []  War as metaphor From an article by George Lakoff. (Discuss it here.) The basic idea of a just war uses the Nation As Person metaphor plus two narratives that have the structure of classical fairy tales: The Self Defense Story and The Rescue Story. Millions of people around the world can see that the metaphors and fairy tales don't fit the current situation, that Gulf War II does not qualify as a just war - a "legal" war. But if you accept all these metaphors, as Americans have been led to do by the administration, the press, and the lack of an effective Democratic opposition, then Gulf War II would indeed seem like a just war. But surely most Americans have been exposed to the facts - the lack of a credible link between Saddam and al Quaeda and the idea that large numbers of innocent Iraqi civilians (estimates are around 500,000) will be killed or maimed by our bombs. Why don't they reach the rational conclusion? One of the fundamental findings of cognitive science is that people think in terms of frames and metaphors - conceptual structures like those we have been describing. The frames are in the synapses of our brains - physically present in the form of neural circuitry. When the facts don't fit the frames, the frames are kept and the facts ignored. It is a common folk theory of progressives that "The facts will set you free!" If only you can get all the facts out there in the public eye, then every rational person will reach the right conclusion. It is a vain hope. Human brains just don't work that way. Framing matters. Frames once entrenched are hard to dispel. Source: Doc Searls, via Too Much News 3:10:57 AM  comment []  © Copyright 2003 Chris Brody. Last update: 06/04/2003; 04:51:31. April 2003 Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat     1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30       Mar   May << Older  |  Newer >>